Shopper Journey Based Marketing – how to deliver integrated Go-To-Market plans
David Harker • May 19, 2021
When integrated plans are executed with excellence across the omnichannel landscape, there is a direct correlation to sales and share growth.
Whether the objective is launching NPD, activating partnerships, creating new consumption occasions or seeking to articulate your brand’s unique benefits, delivering integrated Go-To-Market execution is the long-sought for, but rarely fully achieved, objective of commercial leaders across FMCG.
Whether the objective is launching NPD, activating partnerships, creating new consumption occasions or seeking to articulate your brand’s unique benefits, delivering integrated Go-To-Market execution is the long-sought for, but rarely fully achieved, objective of commercial leaders across FMCG.
Barriers to delivering integrated go-to-market execution for our research:
- Functional Expertise: each function within the sales and marketing machines of major brand owners are typically tasked and organised to deliver different elements of the plan, with different metrics and no consistent comparative measures
- Plethora of Choices: there has been an explosion in the number of touchpoints and investment choices available to influence consumers and shoppers and it’s extraordinarily hard for teams to know where best to invest
- Legacy systems and ways of working: there is no shortage of systems and data, but this is typically held in disparate legacy systems and not easily accessible to inform decision making. The recent pandemic has compounded the situation with remote working making it harder than ever for teams to share, collaborate and align, with no one place to access, assess and adjust the plan.
It takes an enormous effort to deliver high quality, fully aligned plans that work for the consumer, the shopper, the trade and your brand.
We believe the answer to the questions about where best to invest and how best to help the FMCG organisation construct integrated plans across functions that deliver both brand objectives and optimise ROI lies in an evolution of the way we think about Shopper Journey Based Marketing.
Whatever the objective; Awareness, Consideration, Trial or Repeat; understanding consumers, their needs, drivers, shopping missions and consumption occasions from the lens of the shopper journey gives us the ability to target communications effectively.
Whether broadcast or personal, brand or shopper marketing, price or equity message, the shopper doesn’t care who creates it or how it is organised. When the right message is delivered at the right time and in the right way, this communication has been proven to move the shopper further down the path to purchase.
Shopper Journey Based Marketing
calls for connected thinking across functional modalities with the development of strategy and integrated plans that deliver complementary messaging across the right combination of touchpoints targeted to each stage of the shopper journey. For example, awareness and equity building communication may be delivered best by broadcast media aimed at a certain location-driven target demographic profile. This could then be backed up with trial and conversion driving activity executed with those customers that have a higher proportion of the brand's target audience and executed at retail with tactics differentiated to the purchase channel, in-store vs a retailer’s e-commerce site.
Our BASE platform creates the conditions for FMCG commercial teams to generate, align and execute insight-driven integrated sales, category and marketing plans.
- Our planning and AI-driven analytics platform provides an enterprise-wide, approach for laying down and surfacing all elements of the go-to-market plan in one place, under the unifying principle of Shopper Journey Based Marketing.
- This enables the consistent measurement of the impact of these plans with a comparative and predictive ROI across investment choices.
- Teams can identify what works, coordinate activities and easily adjust plans based on competitive, market and macro-economic changes.
Imagine what it would be like if you could surface the on-shelf dates for new products, alongside the launch promotion and shopper marketing plans for your key customers, overlaid with targeted digital and national brand plans, all at the touch of a button.
Imagine if you had the insight available to answer the following questions:
- Which areas of the shopper journey should I invest in to reach my target audience?
- Which touchpoints should I choose and what message should I seek to deliver at each stage of the shopper journey?
- How can I determine what combination of activities will deliver the best ROI for my brand?
Please contact us
for a free consultation and discussion on how we can help you create and deliver more integrated go-to-market plans, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your teams and deliver return for your marketing spend.
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The explosion of digital marketing has disrupted traditional media formats and whilst it has increased our ability to target, it has made it increasingly hard to generate cut through. When and where consumers receive and digest media has also changed dramatically with an increasing number of touch points all the way along the path to purchase. Shopping channels and missions are also evolving rapidly with e-Commerce, and convenience expanding exponentially offering new opportunities but also even more complexity. Navigating these choppy, ever changing waters is challenging, but exciting, as it is forcing us to learn new approaches and skills to drive both consumer and shopper penetration and loyalty. Effective planning and investment choices are critical to winning in this new media landscape. Increasingly the effective use of data, and subsequent targeting, is key to building a winning strategy. At Heineken we have increasingly seen shopper and trade marketing as a critical aspect of the marketing mix that can drive both ours and our customers business. We see this discipline as an essential investment choice as not only does it drive brand equity but it ultimately can result in a direct sale at Point of Purchase. Delivering effective shopper marketing, can really drive cut through, accelerate trial and conversion when it matters most – at the moment of the purchase decision.
BASE® Technologies, a leading Shopper Marketing solution provider for FMCG companies, is delighted to announce the launch of BASE® Training and Consultancy, a best-in-class service aimed specifically at developing Shopper Marketing capabilities to enable growth.
